Chapter 73. Succession and Civil War: the Rashidun, the Fitnas, Kharijites and Ibadis

Muhammad died in 632 without a successor who was also a prophet. The thirty years that followed (the age of the four rashidun, the “rightly guided” caliphs) were a time of conquest abroad and civil war at home. In Karen Armstrong’s reading, the period was “just as formative as that of the Prophet himself”, because “Muslims would define themselves and their theology according to the way they assessed the turbulent, glorious and tragic events of these years” [Armstrong, Islam: A Short History, #53062, “The Rashidun (632-661)”]. This chapter follows that political struggle: the elections of Abu Bakr, Umar and Uthman, the murder of Uthman, the war between Ali and Muawiyah, the arbitration after Siffin, and the breakaway of the Kharijites, the first group in Islam to declare fellow Muslims unbelievers. Each faction gave its own answer to one question, namely who may lead the ummah, and those answers became the lasting divisions of Islam.

The Rashidun and the first conquests (632-656)

Armstrong reports that after the Prophet’s death some Muslims doubted that there should be a “state” at all, and some thought each tribe should elect its own imam. Abu Bakr and Umar ibn al-Khattab argued for a single ruler. Others believed that Muhammad would have wanted his closest male relative, Ali ibn Abi Talib, “since in Arabia, where the blood-tie was sacred, it was thought that a chief’s special qualities were passed down the line of his descendants”. Ali was young, and Abu Bakr “was elected the first khalifah of the Prophet by a majority of votes” [Armstrong, #53062, “The Rashidun”]. Abu Bakr’s short reign (632-634) was taken up with the riddah (“apostasy”) wars. Armstrong calls these revolts “entirely political and economic”, although their leaders claimed to be prophets. She suggests it was “probably during the riddah wars that Muslims began to assert that Muhammad had been the last and greatest of the prophets, a claim that is not made explicitly in the Quran” [Armstrong, #53062]. Sourdel’s glossary adds that Sunni tradition regarded Abu Bakr as the oldest convert, while the Shiites criticised him for taking power and pushing Ali aside [Sourdel & Sourdel-Thomine, Civilizatia Islamului clasic III, #12462, entry “ABU BAKR”].

Under Umar (634-644), who took the title amir al-muminin (“commander of the faithful”), Arab raids became conquest. The Persians were defeated at Qadisiyyah (637) and the Sasanian capital Ctesiphon fell. The Byzantines lost at Yarmuk (636), Jerusalem fell in 638, and by 641 Syria, Palestine and Egypt were in Muslim hands. Armstrong insists that “there was nothing religious about these campaigns”: their aim was plunder and “a common activity that would preserve the unity of the ummah” [Armstrong, #53062, map “The Early Conquests”]. The conquered were organised as dhimmis (protected subjects) paying a poll tax, and the Arab soldiers were housed in garrison towns (amsar): Kufah, Basrah and Fustat. Umar was stabbed in the Medina mosque in November 644 by a Persian prisoner of war. Taheri’s notes record that this man, Firuz, is held by some historians to have killed Umar “as an enemy of Persia”, and that “to Shi’ites Firuz is a saint and his tomb, near Kashan in central Iran, is a place of pilgrimage” [Taheri, Holy Terror, #64433, notes to ch. 3].

Uthman ibn Affan, chosen by six companions, at first ruled successfully: Cyprus, Armenia, the Oxus, Herat and Sind came under Muslim control. But he gave the best posts to his Umayyad kinsmen, including the appointment of Muawiyah, son of the Prophet’s old enemy Abu Sufyan, as governor of Syria. He also angered the Quran-reciters by imposing a single text of the scripture. In 656 mutinous soldiers from Fustat besieged his house and killed him, and the mutineers acclaimed Ali [Armstrong, #53062, pp. 31-33].

The First Fitnah: Ali, Aisha and Muawiyah

The murder of a caliph who had been the Prophet’s son-in-law and one of the earliest converts “inspired a five-year civil war within the ummah, which is known as the fitnah, the time of temptation” [Armstrong, #53062, “The First Fitnah”]. Aisha, with Talhah and Zubayr, attacked Ali for not punishing the killers and was defeated at the Battle of the Camel near Basrah. Ali’s own partisans insisted that Uthman had deserved death, and Ali “could not disown” them. Armstrong judges that by not condemning the murder he cast himself “in a highly dubious light”. The nineteenth-century writer Keightley, following Ockley, gives a sharply different portrait. He makes Aisha “the firebrand of Islam”, vehemently hostile to Ali, and says Uthman was slain “holding the Koran in his lap, by a band of murderers, headed by the brother of Ayesha” [Keightley, Secret Societies of the Middle Ages, #64544, ch. II].

The decisive opposition came from Syria. In Armstrong’s words, “Uthman had been his kinsman, and, as the new head of the Umayyad family, it was his duty as an Arab chieftain to avenge Uthman’s death. He was supported by the wealthy Meccan clans and the Arabs of Syria, who had appreciated his strong and wise government” [Armstrong, #53062, “The First Fitnah”]. Taheri’s notes add that Uthman’s relatives “claimed that Ali had inspired the plot to kill the Caliph” [Taheri, #64433, notes to ch. 3].

Siffin, the arbitration and the secession

The armies met at Siffin on the upper Euphrates in 657. Armstrong’s chronology summarises the outcome: “An attempt is made to arbitrate between the two sides at Siffin; when the arbitration goes against Ali, Muawwiyyah deposes him and is proclaimed caliph in Jerusalem. The Kharajites secede from Ali’s camp” [Armstrong, Islam, #68695, chronology entry 657]. The offline encyclopaedia supplies the episode’s famous detail: “On the verge of defeat, Mu’awiya ordered his soldiers to hoist leaves of the Qur’an (masahif) on their lances”. The qurra (Quran-reciters) in Ali’s army pressed him under threat to accept [Wikipedia: Kharijites]. Sourdel’s glossary places the arbitration meeting at Adhruh, between Ma’an and Petra in present-day Jordan. It describes “the meeting intended to arbitrate, after the battle of Siffin, the conflict between Ali and Muawiyah, which led to the deposition of Ali” [Sourdel, #12462, entry “ADHRUH”, translated from Romanian].

A party in Ali’s army rejected the procedure entirely under the slogan la hukma illa li-llah, “judgment belongs to God alone”. About 12,000 men withdrew to Harura near Kufa. They held that Muawiyah, as a rebel, had to be fought until he repented (Quran 49:9), and that by accepting human arbitration Ali had committed a grave sin [Wikipedia: Kharijites]. Armstrong describes their logic: Uthman had failed the Quranic standard, and Ali “had compromised with the supporters of injustice … and was, therefore, no true Muslim”. The seceders, called kharajis, “insisted that the ruler of the Islamic community should not be the most powerful but the most committed Muslim” [Armstrong, #53062, p. 35]. Sourdel defines them as “former partisans of Ali who abandoned him after the battle of Siffin and adopted a rigorist and egalitarian doctrine” [Sourdel, #12462, entry “HARIDJIŢI”].

When the arbitration talks went ahead in 658, the dissidents elected Abd Allah ibn Wahb al-Rasibi as their own caliph, gathered at Nahrawan on the Tigris and declared Ali and his followers unbelievers. After they killed a traveller and Ali’s envoy, Ali attacked and destroyed them at Nahrawan in July 658 [Wikipedia: Kharijites]. Armstrong records the cost: “Ali’s harsh treatment of the Kharajites cost him much support, even in Kufah. Muawiyyah made steady gains … A second attempt at arbitration, which tried to find another candidate for the caliphate, failed … and in 661 Ali was murdered by a Kharajite” [Armstrong, #53062, pp. 35-36]. The assassin, Ibn Muljam, struck Ali with a poisoned sword during the morning prayer in the mosque of Kufa on 26 January 661, seeking revenge for Nahrawan [Wikipedia: Kharijites]. Taheri reports that he was one of three conspirators sworn to kill Ali, Muawiyah and Amr ibn al-As on the same day, “but only Abdul-Rahman managed to remain true to his oath” [Taheri, #64433, notes to ch. 3]. Hasan, Ali’s son, came to terms with Muawiyah and retired to Medina “for a financial consideration” [Armstrong, #53062, p. 36].

Three answers to the question of leadership

Armstrong presents the civil wars as the origin of Islamic theology. They raised the question of how a society that killed its devout leaders could claim to be guided by God, and of what kind of man should lead: “Should the caliph be the most pious Muslim (as the Kharajites believed), a direct descendant of the Prophet (as the Shiis contended), or should the faithful accept the Umayyads, with all their failings, in the interests of peace and unity?” She compares these debates to “the great Christological debates of the fourth and fifth centuries in Christianity” [Armstrong, Islam, #68695 and #53062, “The Religious Movement”].

Sources: [Armstrong, #53062, pp. 45-48; Wikipedia: Kharijites, “Governance”].

Between the poles stood the Basran school of Hasan al-Basri. His pupil Wasil ibn Ata founded the Mutazilites, who “withdrew” from judging between Ali and Muawiyah, “since they claimed that only God could know what was in men’s hearts”. Armstrong notes, however, that “the Quran exhorts Muslims to ‘command what is good and forbid what is evil,’ and, like the Kharajites, some of the Mutazilites took this very seriously. Some supported Shii rebellions” [Armstrong, #53062, pp. 47-48].

Kharijite sects and the doctrine of takfir

According to the encyclopaedia, most Kharijites “branded as disbelievers (kuffar) Muslims who had committed a grave sin, and the most militant declared killing of such unbelievers to be licit, unless they repented”. It also warns that almost everything known about them comes from hostile ninth- and tenth-century heresiographers [Wikipedia: Kharijites]. During the Second Fitna (680-692) the movement split into four “mother sects”:

• Azariqa (Nafi ibn al-Azraq): non-Kharijite Muslims were polytheists and apostates who could be killed “along with their women and children” (the doctrine of isti’rad). Intermarriage was forbidden, taqiyya was rejected, and emigration to their camp was obligatory. They were destroyed in Kirman in 698-699.
• Najdat (Najda ibn Amir): at one point they controlled most of Arabia. They later dropped the duty of war, and some denied that the imamate was obligatory, a stance Patricia Crone called “an early form of anarchism”.
• Sufriyya: they held non-Kharijites to be unbelievers but avoided fighting them unless necessary. Modern historians suspect the heresiographers partly invented the category.
• Ibadiyya: they called opponents only kuffar bil-ni’ma (“ungrateful for God’s blessings”) or hypocrites, not polytheists, and permitted living among and marrying them [Wikipedia: Kharijites, “Beliefs and practices”].

The Umayyad governors Ziyad ibn Abihi and his son Ubayd Allah ibn Ziyad “are said to have killed 13,000 Kharijites”, which pushed survivors toward concealment and quietism [Wikipedia: Kharijites].

The Ibadis: the surviving moderate branch

Ibadism grew from that quietist current in Basra. Abd Allah ibn Ibad stayed in the city when Ibn al-Azraq left for Ahvaz, arguing that the Basrans were guilty only of “ingratitude” (kufr ni’ma), “a lesser offense that allowed true Muslims to live among them”. The scholar Jabir ibn Zayd, recognised by Ibadis as their first imam, built the school under kitman (concealment). Its imam was elected rather than dynastic [Wikipedia: Ibadism]. The movement is dated to c. AD 692 in Basra and today numbers about 3 million. Oman holds the largest community, with outposts in the Mzab (Algeria), Djerba (Tunisia), the Nafusa mountains and Zuwarah (Libya) and Zanzibar. Contemporary Ibadis “may object to being classified as Kharijites” [Wikipedia: Ibadism]. Sourdel describes the Ibadis as a “moderate Kharijite sect” that spread chiefly among the Berbers of the Maghreb. There, “adherence to Kharijism was a form of opposition to the central power” and drove revolts against the Abbasid and then the Fatimid caliphates [Sourdel, #12462, entry “IBADIŢI”]. The encyclopaedia notes that “much of the earlier writings from within the Islamic world presented Ibadism as a heresy”, and that Western study began in the mid-nineteenth century with French and Italian translations of Ibadi texts [Wikipedia: Ibadi studies].

Takfir as a political weapon: the forward link

The Kharijite habit of excommunicating a ruler held to be sinful did not die with the sects. The encyclopaedia observes that the term Kharijites “is often used by modern mainstream Muslims to describe Islamist extremist groups that have been compared to the Kharijites for their radical ideology and militancy”, while “some modern Arab historians have stressed the egalitarian and proto-democratic tendencies of the Kharijites” [Wikipedia: Kharijites]. Rabasa and his RAND co-authors describe the modern form of the argument without using the Kharijite label. They trace al-Qaeda’s division of the world into belief and “apostasy” to Sayyid Qutb, who “provided the theoretical underpinnings for ‘violent Muslim resistance to regimes that claim to be Muslim, but whose implementation of Islamic precepts is judged to be imperfect'”. Toppling “‘apostate’ regimes, particularly Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Pakistan” is listed among the movement’s chief aims [Rabasa et al., Beyond al-Qaeda, #368002, pp. xvii, 11]. Chapter 8.11 takes up this line of descent.

Key points

• The four rashidun (632-661) were chosen by consultation, not by descent. A minority believed Ali had inherited the Prophet’s charisma [Armstrong, #53062].
• Armstrong regards the early conquests as pragmatic campaigns for plunder and unity, not religious war [Armstrong, #53062].
• Uthman’s murder (656) began the First Fitnah. Muawiyah claimed a chieftain’s duty of vengeance, backed by the Meccan clans and Syria [Armstrong, #53062].
• The arbitration after Siffin (657), held according to Sourdel at Adhruh, led to Ali’s deposition and Muawiyah’s proclamation in Jerusalem [Armstrong, #68695; Sourdel, #12462].
• The Kharijites seceded under the motto “judgment belongs to God alone”. Ali crushed them at Nahrawan (658), and a Kharijite, Ibn Muljam, killed him in 661 [Wikipedia: Kharijites].
• Three answers to the leadership question emerged: the most pious (Kharijites), the Prophet’s descendant (Shiis), or the ruler in power for unity’s sake (the majority) [Armstrong, #68695].
• The Azariqa, Najdat, Sufriyya and Ibadiyya differed chiefly on how far takfir (declaring Muslims unbelievers) licensed violence. The Ibadis, c. 3 million today and centred in Oman, are the surviving moderate branch [Wikipedia: Kharijites; Wikipedia: Ibadism].
• Modern Muslim critics apply the Kharijite comparison to jihadist movements whose excommunication of “apostate” regimes Rabasa et al. trace to Qutb [Wikipedia: Kharijites; Rabasa et al., #368002].